Last week, while I was trying my hardest to avoid completing my homework, I ran across a rather interesting article in Time Magazine. The article basically enumerated the beliefs of the transhumanists, a group of people that believe that the advancement of technology will, in the near future, lead to an event called the Singularity.

The Singularity is a hypothetical event that is supposed to drastically change the entire nature of humanity. Computers will become as powerful as human minds. We will “plug in” our brains into computer networks. The immense power of these new computers will help us reverse aging and we could even upload the memory and data in our brains and live forever. It was at this point when I stopped reading and put my thinking hat on: Even if we could live forever on this veil of tears known as planet Earth, would we really want to?

The most outspoken proponent of this scientific fountain of youth, according to Time, is a British biologist by the name of Aubrey de Grey. I’ve read about de Grey before. He’s a rather eccentric, self-educated man whose work on aging has gotten him a number of honorary doctorates from rather prestigious universities. According to the article, de Grey has divided the process of aging into seven categories, and he takes an approach similar to a car repairman when it comes to aging, and he sees the body entirely as a machine that needs maintenance. While I can appreciate a good deal of his work, the amount of effort that he puts into avoiding death is almost unnerving. It reminds me of a rather chilling excerpt from Peter Lawler’s essay, “Conservative Postmodernism, Postmodern Conservatism”:

“The more secure or free from contingency he is objectively, the more he experiences his existence as contingent and the more he is haunted by death. The more death is pushed back by modern technology, the more accidental it seems. The more accidental or less necessary death seems, the more terrible it seems.”

I certainly believe that Lawler is onto something here. Surely, death seems scarier when it is seen as something completely avoidable and accidental. You can imagine a man, who by the grace of science, can never die of natural causes. Because of this, this man takes no risks. While it might be normal to avoid something like skydiving, a calculating immortal man may never get in a car or even step outside, because one day the odds will catch up to him. The modern man who dies in a car crash may have risked and lost maybe 80 years of life. The immortal man may lose hundreds of thousands of years. Paradoxically, the gift of eternal life may take away man’s ability to live his own life.

I think there is a far more pressing potential problem with human beings being immortal, even if we put aside the obvious demographic and health care issues. The problem would be empathy. Author and political adviser Jeremy Rifkin argues in his talk, “The Empathetic Civilization,” that our empathy for each other is dependent on our mortality. The fragility of our own lives is what allows us to understand the plight of others. The immortal man is put on a much less empathetic and far more independent trek. In this way, immortality robs a man of his own humanity.

While the predictions of transhumanism are rather far out and may never come true, it’s quite easy to see how it or a similar brand of utopianism may one day catch on with a large number of people. The philosophical problems it poses will most likely need to be addressed as technology advances, no matter what. While transhumanism advocates that we shed our mortal coil and become something more than human, I believe that it is far more imperative that we do not lose our own humanity in the process.